On the eve of the UN climate change meetings in Paris (COP 21) there were high-profile protest marches and demonstrations in cities across Canada and worldwide. A massive march and related protests were also planned for Paris, but these were banned by the French government in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks.

So the environmentalists got clever — placing over ten thousand pairs of shoes (including those of the Pope and the secretary general of the UN) in Place de la Republic in Paris to symbolize the protesters who otherwise would have been there. There was also a scaled-down illegal action, where protesters formed a human chain, that was broken up by police with tear gas. Onsite at COP 21 there were number of colourful legal demos by youth delegates (including 17 members of the Canadian Youth Delegation) and others.

What’s the point of environmentalist protests, or protests linked to other social movements? Based on a very different movement — the 1960s anti-war movement — Todd Gitlin wrote a book entitled The Whole World is Watching. As the title suggests, it’s often the case that protest can win widespread public attention via the media. And protest has become routine in Western liberal democracies, as Sidney Tarrow and David Meyer have documented in their book, The Social Movement Society.

So what are protesters are up to? Who is the intended audience? Does it make a difference? Activists have multiple motives for protesting. Some protests work, some don’t; as academics like to say, it depends.

One reason for protest is to seek media attention. Media attention, in turn, makes the actions of protesters visible to the general public, and to politicians. If protesters are clever with protest signs (“1.5 to survive”), stunts (like the shoe protest in Paris) and sound bites (in speeches and interviews), they can communicate their arguments to the public, which may in turn influence public opinion.

Shifting public opinion, in turn, can influence politicians. Indeed, recent polling (conducted in Canada by Nanos, and reported in the Globe and Mail and elsewhere) and in the U.S. (reported by the New York Times) shows increased majority public support for their governments signing on to international agreements to tackle climate change.

Protests can also have an effect within a movement itself. Activists can become reinvigorated and recommitted through collective action and interaction with fellow movement participants. Such symbolic interaction can reinforce collective identities, such as identification with the environmental movement.

The number of people who show up for protests can have important implications. Politicians sometimes use the number of protesters as an indicator of the public’s relative support for certain policy issues. The media, however, is somewhat fickle. Anthony Downs referred to this as the “issue-attention cycle”, the phenomenon whereby media will only pay attention to a particular issue for a limited period of time before it fades from headlines, even though in most instances the issue has not been resolved.

For instance, while the recent climate marches leading up to the COP 21 meetings received lots of media attention, many other events in recent years have received scant media attention — even when attended by large numbers of protesters. The Paris COP21 gathering itself received considerable attention. But if past media patterns are replicated, it should be expected that media attention to climate change will decline in the coming months.

Another factor is what social movement scholars call “political opportunities”. This is the extent to which governments (or other actors) are receptive to, and/or vulnerable to, pressure from social movements. For instance, in the 1990s the British Columbia NDP government turned its back on environmentalists — Premier Glen Clark called them “enemies of B.C.” — and the environmental movement had to turn to other strategies (e.g.: a successful international boycott of B.C. forest products).

Part of the reason for qualified optimism is that many environmentalists see the agreement as an tool/opportunity to put further pressure on governments to do more, and they see protest as a mechanism to hold governments to account.

The former federal Conservative government was skeptical of anthropogenic climate change and opposed to policies that would involve putting a price on carbon, or force them to live up to international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol. Some high-profile Conservative politicians, such as former cabinet minister Joe Oliver and former Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself, referred to environmentalists as “foreign funded radicals”. Not much receptivity there, either.

By contrast, the new federal Liberal government is seemingly quite receptive to groups who are concerned about climate change, and want to push for policy measures to deal with climate change. Indeed, there were at least half a dozen newly elected or re-elected Liberal MPs who had significant profiles in environmental circles, and considerable expertise on the climate change file, and who had been speculated about as possible environment ministers. Recent changes in provincial governments (Alberta), or re-election of governments (Ontario) which included addressing climate change as part of their mandate, have also increased the political opportunities for the environmental movement to positively influence government policy.

At COP21, Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna, who co-facilitated the negotiations, shocked many — and delighted environmentalists — by announcing that Canada wanted to push for a target of 1.5c for the Paris Agreement. At COP21, I asked Claire Martin, a Canadian Green party delegate, about Canada’s role. “I am more than thrilled (with) McKenna,” Martin said. “I think the team has been brilliant so far. Ask advice when they think they needed it, gone ahead and made great decisions.”

There is much more to the environmental movement, however, than just protest. There are a wide array of environmental organizations — from groups that focus mostly on stunts and protests to groups that work mostly on policy issues. ENGOs have influenced movement on climate change issues in a variety of ways — through affecting public opinion, engaging with policy makers, collaborating with the private sector and pressuring governments to act. These groups played a variety of different roles at COP21 — interacting with negotiators and holding press conferences for media workers to disseminate information about the negotiations, and options for the agreement.

A large number of high-profile Canadian environmentalists (and those from other countries) attended COP 21. There seemed be a constellation of factors supporting progress on climate policy — including shifts in public opinion, receptive governments and, at COP 21, much increased engagement by the business community. And there was a cautiously optimistic mood about progress at the meetings and their aftermath.

On Saturday, December 12 there was a large, initially unauthorized protest in Paris organized by 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Attac, and others, to coincide with the end of the COP21 negotiations. In a pre-protest statement, organizers stated that the planned actions were meant “to show the movement’s commitment to keep up the fight for climate justice. People will carry red flowers to honour the past and future victims of climate change, as well as to signify their personal commitment to keep taking action long after the climate talks end.”

In the end, several thousand protesters gathered near the Arc de Triomphe, the Champ de Mars and other locations in Paris. As the negotiations were mostly completed by that point, these demonstrations were mostly symbolic, and also served as an opportunity for solidarity building amongst environmental activists who traveled to, or resided in Paris.

While France was still under a state of emergency, and large outdoor protests and gatherings were prohibited, it is interesting that the authorities relented and made an exception for the December 12 protests. This was likely to avoid embarrassment as the protests were destined to go ahead anyway; also, the French government was taking COP 21 very seriously, and presumably wanted the end of the conference to be a feel-good moment. (Undoubtedly there were some behind-the-scenes negotiations between movement representatives and security officials.)

An assessment of the Paris Agreement is beyond the scope of this article. However, a few things are worth noting. The agreement seems to be getting mostly positive, though qualified, reviews. In some ways, this is surprising; the commitments regarding temperature/emissions reduction targets that have been made by countries are only about half of what is needed to avert disaster. Further, the temperature/emissions reductions targets themselves are not legally binding (though other aspects of the agreement will be legally binding once they are approved by the governments of the participating countries). In other words, the commitments aren’t enough, and there are no legal consequences for a country for failing to meet up to its commitments.

While some ENGO leaders as well as some leaders from other sectors of civil society, and from developing countries, were quite critical of the limitations of the Paris Agreement, in my view a large number of environmental movement leaders (especially Canadians) were surprisingly sanguine about the agreement, despite the limitations. For example, near the end of the conference but before the agreement was finalized, I talked to Mike Hudema from Greenpeace. He stated: “I think that there’s definitely a lot of hope coming into this conference and I think that we’ve seen some … leadership in areas that we’ve never seen before … especially from the U.S. government … some real significant steps from the Canadian government, although now they need to come up with plans to meet those. But we’ve seen some real leaders emerge, which has been really amazing. But there’s still, you know, some real areas of work that we need.”

In the days following the agreement, it became evident from the statements of various movement leaders, such as Bill McKibben (of 350.org), and Elizabeth May (of the Canadian Green Party), that part of the reason for qualified optimism is that many environmentalists see the agreement as an tool/opportunity to put further pressure on governments to do more, and they see protest as a mechanism to hold governments to account.

As McKibben argued in a New York Times column, the movement intends to work to ensure that “the Paris agreement turns into a floor and not a ceiling for action. We’ll be blocking pipelines, fighting new coal mines, urging divestment from fossil fuels …”

The whole world will be watching.

D.B. Tindall is an associate professor of sociology at UBC and a contributor to a recently published book entitled Protest and Politics: The Promise of Social Movement Societies, edited by Howard Ramos and Kathleen Rogers, published by UBC Press.

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